Contents

Youth

Lorenzo's grandfather, Cosimo de' Medici, was the first member of the Medici family to combine running the Medici Bank with leading the Republic of Florence. Cosimo was one of the wealthiest men in Europe and spent a very large portion of his fortune in government and philanthropy. He was a patron of the arts and funded public works.[5] Lorenzo's father, Piero di Cosimo de' Medici, was equally at the centre of Florentine life, chiefly as an art patron and collector, while Lorenzo's grandfather and uncle, Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici, took care of the family's business interests. Lorenzo's mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, was a writer of sonnets and a friend to poets and philosophers of the Medici Academy. She became her son's advisor after the deaths of his father and uncle.[5]

Piero sent Lorenzo on many important diplomatic missions when he was still a youth, which included trips to Rome to meet the pope and other important religious and political figures.[8]

Lorenzo was described as rather plain of appearance and was of average height, having a broad frame and short legs, a swarthy skin, squashed nose, short-sighted eyes and a harsh voice. Giuliano, on the other hand, was regarded as handsome; he was used as a model by Botticelli in his painting of Mars and Venus.[9]

The Adoration of the Magi includes several generations of the family and their retainers. Sixteen-year-old Lorenzo is to the left, with his horse, prior for his departure on a diplomatic mission to Milan.

Politics

Lorenzo, groomed for power, assumed a leading role in the state upon the death of his father in 1469, when he was twenty. Already drained by his grandfather's building projects and constantly stressed by mismanagement, wars, and political expenses, the bank's assets contracted seriously during the course of Lorenzo's lifetime.[10]

Lorenzo, like his grandfather, father, and son, ruled Florence indirectly through surrogates in the city councils, threats, payoffs and strategic marriages.[11] Although Florence flourished under Lorenzo's rule, he effectively reigned as a despot, and people had little political freedom.[12] Rival Florentine families inevitably harboured resentments over the Medicis' dominance, and enemies of the Medici remained a factor in Florentine life long after Lorenzo's passing.[11] The most notable of the rival families was the Pazzi, who nearly brought Lorenzo's reign to an end right after it began.[13]

On Easter Sunday, 26 April 1478, in an incident called the Pazzi conspiracy, a group including members of the Pazzi family, backed by the Archbishop of Pisa and his patron Pope Sixtus IV, attacked Lorenzo and his brother and co-ruler, Giuliano, in the Cathedral of Florence. Giuliano was killed, but Lorenzo escaped with only a stab wound. The conspiracy was brutally put down by such measures as the lynching of the Archbishop of Pisa and the death of the Pazzi family members who were directly involved.[13]

In the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy and the punishment of Pope Sixtus IV's supporters, the Medici and Florence suffered from the wrath of the Holy See, which seized all the Medici assets Sixtus could find, excommunicated Lorenzo and the entire government of Florence and ultimately put the entire Florentine city-state under interdict.[14] When these moves had little effect, Sixtus formed a military alliance with King Ferdinand I of Naples, whose son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, led an invasion of the Florentine Republic, still ruled by Lorenzo.[15]

Lorenzo rallied the citizens. However, with little support from the traditional Medici allies in Bologna and Milan (the latter being convulsed by power struggles among the Milanese ruling family, the Sforza),[13] the war dragged on, and only diplomacy by Lorenzo, who personally traveled to Naples, ultimately resolved the crisis. That success enabled Lorenzo to secure constitutional changes within the Florentine Republic's government, which further enhanced his own power.[11]

Thereafter, Lorenzo, like his grandfather Cosimo de' Medici, pursued a policy both of maintaining peace and a balance of power between the northern Italian states and of keeping the other major European states such as France and the Holy Roman Empire's Habsburg rulers out of Italy. Lorenzo maintained good relations with Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire, as the Florentine maritime trade with the Ottomans was a major source of wealth for the Medici.[16]

Lorenzo was an artist himself, writing poetry in his native Tuscan. In his poetry he celebrates life even while, particularly in his later works, he acknowledged with melancholy the fragility and instability of the human condition. Love, feasts and light dominate his verse.[17]

Cosimo had started the collection of books that became the Medici Library (also called the Laurentian Library), and Lorenzo expanded it. Lorenzo's agents retrieved from the East large numbers of classical works, and he employed a large workshop to copy his books and disseminate their content across Europe. He supported the development of humanism through his circle of scholarly friends including the philosophers Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.[18] They studied Greek philosophers and attempted to merge the ideas of Plato with Christianity.

Apart from a personal interest, Lorenzo also used the Florentine scene of fine arts for his diplomatic efforts. An example includes the commission of Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli to Rome to paint murals in the Sistine Chapel, a move that has been interpreted as sealing the alliance between Lorenzo and Pope Sixtus IV.[18]

In 1471, Lorenzo calculated that since 1434, his family had spent some 663,000 florins (about US$460 million today) on charity, buildings and taxes. He wrote,

"I do not regret this for though many would consider it better to have a part of that sum in their purse, I consider it to have been a great honour to our state, and I think the money was well-expended and I am well-pleased."[19]

Lorenzo also adopted his nephew Giulio, the illegitimate son of his slain brother Giuliano. Giulio later became Pope Clement VII.

Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule from the Sassetti Chapel frescos. Among the spectators are Lorenzo's sons, (from the right) Giuliano, with their tutor Poliziano, Piero and Giovanni.

Later years

During his tenure, several branches of the family bank collapsed because of bad loans, and, in later years, he got into financial difficulties and resorted to misappropriating trust and state funds.

Toward the end of Lorenzo's life, Florence came under the spell of Savonarola, who believed Christians had strayed too far into Greco-Roman culture. Lorenzo played a role in bringing Savonarola to Florence.[21]

He died during the late night of 8 April or during the early morning of 9 April 1492, at the longtime family villa of Careggi (Florentine reckoning considers days to begin at sunset, so his death date is the 9th in that reckoning). Savonarola visited Lorenzo on his death bed. The rumour that Savonarola damned Lorenzo on his deathbed has been refuted in Roberto Ridolfi's book, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola. Letters written by witnesses to Lorenzo's death report that he died peacefully after listening to the Gospel of the day. Many signs and portents were claimed to have taken place at the moment of his death, including the dome of Florence Cathedral being struck by lightning, ghosts appearing, and the lions kept at Via Leone fighting one another.[22]

The Signoria and councils of Florence issued a decree:

"Whereas the foremost man of all this city, the lately deceased Lorenzo de' Medici, did, during his whole life, neglect no opportunity of protecting, increasing, adorning and raising this city, but was always ready with counsel, authority and painstaking, in thought and deed; shrank from neither trouble nor danger for the good of the state and its freedom..... it has seemed good to the Senate and people of Florence.... to establish a public testimonial of gratitude to the memory of such a man, in order that virtue might not be unhonoured among Florentines, and that, in days to come, other citizens may be incited to serve the commonwealth with might and wisdom."[23]

Lorenzo was buried with his brother Giuliano in the Church of San Lorenzo, in the red porphyry sarcophagus designed for Piero and Giovanni de' Medici, not, as might be expected, in the New Sacristy, designed by Michelangelo. This chapel holds the two monumental tombs of Lorenzo and Giulano's less known namesakes, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours.[24] According to Williamson and others, the statues of the lesser Lorenzo and Giuliano have been carved by Michelangelo to incorporate the essence of the famous men. In 1559, the bodies of Lorenzo "The Magnificent" de' Medici and his brother Giuliano were interred in the New Sacristy in an unmarked tomb beneath Michelangelo's statue of the Madonna.[24]

Lorenzo's heir was his eldest son, Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, known as "Piero the Unfortunate". He squandered his father's patrimony and brought down the Medici dynasty in Florence. The second son, Giovanni, who became Pope Leo X soon afterwards, restored it, but it was not made wholly secure again until the accession of his great-grandson from a branch line of the family, Cosimo I de' Medici.[24]

In popular culture

Lorenzo de' Medici is depicted as a teenager in CBBC's Leonardo, played by actor Colin Ryan. However, the historical accuracy of the series is questionable.[25]

Further reading

Miles J. Unger, Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici (Simon and Schuster 2008) is a vividly colorful new biography of this true "renaissance man", the uncrowned ruler of Florence during its golden age.

Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (Morrow-Quill, 1980) is a highly readable, non-scholarly general history of the family, and covers Lorenzo's life in some detail.

F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de- Medici and the Art of Magnificence (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History) (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) A summary of 40 years of research with a specific theme of Il Magnifico's relationship with the visual arts.